


dreams and imprints of the past (keeping me awake)

by FreakCityPrincess



Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016)
Genre: Bodhi Rook deserves a hug and lots of love, F/M, Gen, Heart-to-Heart Conversations, Honestly I just love the Jyn/Bodhi sibling trope, I will go down with this trope, Insomnia, Minor background Cassian Andor/Jyn Erso, Non-Biological Space Siblings, Written during ungodly hours, late night discussions
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-19
Updated: 2018-08-19
Packaged: 2019-06-26 23:13:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,210
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15673224
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FreakCityPrincess/pseuds/FreakCityPrincess
Summary: Jyn doesn't embrace most nights the way the human body requires, because control is absent in sleep and the galaxy is a cunning place.This time around, though, there are people who'll help with that.





	dreams and imprints of the past (keeping me awake)

**Author's Note:**

> Typing up Rogue One ficlets off the top of my head is how I choose to deal with my insomnia. It's healthy.

Apart from the quiet darkness and the fact that the portion of the galaxy you happened to be in was mostly asleep (sleeping sentients left you alone), Jyn Erso wasn't too fond of the nights.

Nights meant re-living bad memories, often made worse, with perfect clarity and no control of events. Nights meant having to clamp your eyes shut and keep your breathing quiet, try not to react out loud to a bad dream because you would draw attention to yourself (attention of the most unwelcome kind).

For a time after Scarif, the nights had, impossibly, got even worse.

(Almost dying could do that to a person.)

But in time the situation had climbed down from its high, and by the time a year had passed, the nightmares of a Death Star, a tower, a beach, falling, falling...they'd waxed and waned and become less frequent.

She had her team ( _family,_ insisted a trusting little girl who'd been buried years ago) to thank for that. Their work for the Alliance kept her in a state of constant vigil, and new worries and concerns, new objectives and injuries had started to tear her mind away from the past. Sometimes she didn't get enough sleep to have dreams in the first place. Sometimes she just...slept.

And if she was feeling particularly reluctant to embrace the night the way the normal human body demanded, she even stayed awake to indulge K-2 in an argument while he charged his chassis, or break open one of Chirrut's precious herbal blends and suffer the strong taste with Cassian, or join Bodhi on the lower bunk and talk to him. The nights she refused to embrace always turned out to be the best ones.

###### 

The ship was en route to a far part of the galaxy (anything beyond Mid-Rim space was far from Hoth) in a journey that would take ninety-two standard hours, or three long hyperspace nights. The mission's details had been elaborately set before them in the briefing room back on Base, and aside from the fact that there was no such thing as a smooth mission, it didn't look the worst. Jyn had caught five undisturbed hours of sleep on the first night, but only after Chirrut had gently forced her own perpetual tiredness as a reason on her.

Tonight she could close her eyes but sleep just wouldn't take her. It was years of denying sleep that caused it, she knew; once upon a time, she hadn't been in such secure surroundings, and falling asleep could be the thing that guaranteed she wouldn't wake up the next day.

The soft grey darkness of her cabin on the ship was both gentle and too harsh on her eyes.

Jyn shifted, restless. It didn't help that her thought processes were only slightly below their normal functioning level, her ears hypersensitive to every whirring and click of the ship's engine, hyperdrive, displaced screws and bolts in a compartment somewhere. She could hear Bodhi's breathing in the bunk below her.

She wasn't entirely sure, but the risk wouldn't be ill-advised. The pilot was a heavy sleeper; she wouldn't disturb him unless he was already up.

"Bodhi?" she ventured, then winced at how foreign her own voice sounded in the relative quiet.

She heard a muffled groan.

" _'M tryna sleep._ "

She sighed, settling back into the hard block that passed for her pillow. "Okay."

Bodhi groaned again, but the noise wasn't muffled this time. "Can't. Spent too much time...too much time on the screens, my eyes aren't closing."

She couldn't deny him his rest. He deserved it more than she deserved company. "Just keep them closed," her voice was infinitely quieter now, matching his, having acclimated to her surroundings. "You'll fall asleep."

"'S not working."

"Just try."

The cabin dropped back into the normal chasm of silence chipped by little noises. Jyn closed her eyes and tried to follow her own advice, but her thoughts were too conscious, too scrambled.

She kept contemplating climbing down and leaving the cabin, taking a stroll around the ship. Going to Kaytoo and seeing if he was awake, and entertaining (annoying) them both. Or she could sit in the cockpit, watch the lanes of stars streaking by until she grew tired of it, and that eventually lulled her to sleep.

She thought about the mission that lay ahead of them, of the three different objectives they'd been given. She wondered what kind of danger they'd find themselves in this time around.

She thought about the sparring matches she'd had with Chirrut back on Echo Base -it was utterly humiliating, being on the end of that staff, but it wasn't like she didn't put up a good show- and her own classes of recruits-in-training. Her mind drifting to many other sleepless nights in the nearby past, wondering how those had been overcome.

(She remembered humming to herself to pass the time as she waited for sleep to come. Focusing on the cold in her bones and shivering herself to sleep, when Hoth's temperature dropped to particularly merciless levels. Finding Cassian in his quarters, working late, and sitting on his bed watching him tinker with droid parts or write up reports until, one or two hours in, she did feel the calming pull out of consciousness.)

Maybe Cassian would be awake? But it was a risk, on the chance that he wasn't, to go knocking at his door. She didn't want to push this predicament of restlessness on others.

Her own thoughts distracted her from a series of sounds from the bottom bunk, and before she knew it, Bodhi was climbing up the short ladder with a weary smile on his face.

She opened her mouth to ask, but he got there first.

"I can't sleep, and neither can you by the looks of it. I'm going to, going to hang here for a change." He crawled to sit beside her, legs dangling off the edge of her higher bunk.

"Feeling low?" she joked dryly.

Bodhi quirked an eyebrow. "Not really. I just wanted to be on top of things."

Despite the sacred quiet that their voices weren't quite breaching, she couldn't help her muffled laugh. She bumped him gently with her shoulder. "You're terrible."

He bumped right back, playfully, and she felt grateful- so Force-damned grateful it was almost overwhelming- for him and for everything she had in this life, that she had never dreamed of having in the distant past.

"You have any work tomorrow?" asked Bodhi, now a little less quiet, and the cabin's darkness- what passed for 'night', anyway, when in hyperspace- didn't feel nearly as oppressive. Space had no nights and days, it was always dark, but they still ran their usual sleep schedules (as required by the human body) and called twenty-four galactic standard hours a day.

"Cassian has some details to run me through, but otherwise, not really."

Bodhi snorted. "If the plan this time involves the two of you doing something ridiculously dangerous and relying on me for an extraction, let...let me know."

Jyn tried and failed to suppress her grin. "Alright. And if Chirrut and Baze are planning on disobeying orders to follow us into the field..."

"I'll let you know. I promise."

If you payed enough attention, from the top bunk you could feel the gentle swaying of the ship as it cruised the waves of hyperspace. Modern ship models did not have this flaw, but as a ship aged and parts were replaced, it became a bit of a problem. The subtle swaying was even more noticeable given the way they were seated.

"Have I ever told you the story about the sheep?" Bodhi asked, out of the blue.

Jyn's eyebrow hitched a fraction. "No, never heard that one before."

The pilot looked forward into the dark of their cabin. "It's, it's an old Jedhan story. There was once this local girl, she was...she was having trouble falling asleep one night. So she left her house and went into the village. She was surprised by...by how beautiful the night was, when all living things were asleep. She ventured further, because she wanted to see more. She had never been to the far end of the village because there was a caste disparity, and people of the more powerful caste, like, like her were not allowed to go there except for the sake of trade. The higher caste, they were traders, and the other people were...were farmers. The traders used to look down on the farmers because they were still stuck in poverty. But no one was around to prevent her from making her way there, so she went right in." Bodhi paused for a breath before continuing. His stammer had improved drastically in recent times, but many of the after effects of what Saw had done to him- the nervous fluttering of his fingertips, the shaking, and at times the shivering- showed no signs of dying down just yet. She placed a hand on his shoulder, a gentle but firm pressure, an offering of her presence. He smiled fleetingly in acknowledgement.

"The girl stopped by a pen of sheep that had accidentally been left open. Many of the sheep had escaped. She panicked a little, because she knew that was not a good thing, and she went around the village looking for them. There is, there is an old Jedhan saying, um, _misfortune will be with the one who forgets to lock his pen._ I think it came from this story. Or someone had told this to her. So she, uh, she started looking for the escaped sheep becaus she knew their owner would be stricken when he woke up the following morning."

"She knew how to handle sheep?" asked Jyn.

Bodhi shrugged. "I guess? She must have figured it out. But in, in the space of one night, she rounded up all the escaped sheep and put them back in the pen. There was no one to supervise it after, so she stuck around until morning. And then this villager shows up, followed by so many others, and he's wailing that he had forgotten to lock his pen last night and everyone is ready to search the whole area, but they see the girl waiting with her back against the pen to keep the door closed and they- yeah. It's, uh, it's a story they used to tell children."

Jyn squeezed his shoulder gently. "It's nice."

Bodhi chuckled weakly. "No, you don't get it. I didn't tell you the whole thing, or...or as much as I should have. See, when children can't sleep and their parents have to tell them a bedtime story, the story about the girl and the sheep is popular. It...it changes every time. The point is to drag it out for as long as possible, and you're supposed to...to add in your own details, of her adventures while she tried to round up the sheep. In some versions she goes into the forest and braves many dangers. It's...you make it a long story, and a little boring if you want your child to fall asleep faster."

Jyn was about to say something in response, a _that's actually very clever,_ but when she opened her mouth all that came out was a surprising yawn.

Bodhi smiled out of the corner of his mouth, before he also muffled a yawn.

She laughed, leaning back against the wall as her shoulders shook. The eerie quiet of night was still there, a bit, of the air was vibrant now even as her eyelids felt heavy. "Looks like it works on everyone."

Bodhi dropped his shoulders, ducking his head to hide a sleepy smile and another half-yawn. "Well, my work here is done."

She shifted to settle down with her head on the hard block of pillow, stretching her legs across the bed. The corners of her vision were finally, blessedly, darkening.

Before Bodhi could start his descent, however, she sat up, catching his hand. At his questioning look, she offered a smile that she hoped conveyed everything she couldn't put into words.

_Thank you. For being there. For doing that for me._

_I haven't heard a bedtime story in Force knows how long._

But Bodhi's answering smile said he understood. "Anytime. Goodnight, Jyn."

Her grip loosened, but he didn't pull away immediately. She could appreciate that, too.

She was so grateful. For this new life, her team, even the new take on her sleepless nights.

_I will not let any harm come to you,_ she caught herself thinking. It surprised her- but not as much as it should have. She knew she meant every bit of it. _Nothing in this kriffing galaxy is allowed to hurt you, Bodhi Rook._

"Sleep well," she told him.

Bodhi muffled another yawn, followed by a self-deprecating laugh. "I'm sure I will. You too."

Her senses were not as sensitive to the ship's various sounds anymore, or to its gentle swaying. She heard the _scritch-scratch_ of Alliance-issued blankets from below, and a creak as her bunkmate found a comfortable angle. He was fast asleep in seconds, and Jyn didn't have to deal with sleeplessness for much longer.


End file.
